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Dear Sirs,
I read the excellent article by Auchincloss and Michels (2003) with great interest and benefit. The authors illustrate the problems and controversies regarding psychoanalytic education comprehensively; nevertheless, I wish to add some comments. As they point out, the controversies are not recent. The solution they see is in ‘strengthening the intellectual, scholarly and research context within which psychoanalytic education takes place’. A proposition very close to the one that was accepted at the APA Fall Meeting in 1974, but one which was hardly followed by most Institutes.
To become an analyst—both in the sense to acquire knowledge and skill, as well as to be accepted as one—depends on relationships to a high degree. The relationships between applicant and interviewer, between teacher and student, between supervisor and supervisee, in the group of candidates and members of the Institute are rather complex and also strongly influenced by unconscious fantasies and motives. How to accommodate this becomes even more problematic, as psychoanalytic competence is often interchangeable with personality traits and the idealised image of the person of the psychoanalyst (Szecsödy, 1999).